If you need the stablitity of a static ip on your local network how about DynDNS or something similar then just specifing a name when you need to connect.

I really can't remember, but is it even possible outside of the windows version of apache to specify a domain name for win98.

One thought, is that "sek" is the netbios name of the win98 machine. that would probably explain the lack of static ip. netbios is independent of the ip scheme. We had a case on campus at the end of spring break where the DHCP server was down and the only network services available were the non-ip windows file shares.

thats because windows has its own dhcpserver independent - dhcp like mechanism to allocate an ip address in case the dhcp is down!
windows (above 95) will try a specific range of ips to ensure its address is unique. (sth like 169.....)